HOW TO STRIKE THAT PERFECT BALANCE FOR ALL SEASONS

The weather is warming, the daffodils are up and the green tips of flowering plants are emerging from their winter sleep. But look out the window, right now. Is there a garden out there?

Or is it rather the promise of a garden, the daffodils pushing up through the moldering remnants of last year's foliage? Has the garden merited more than a glance at any time since November?

Yes, it's April, after all. Hardly the border's best month. Think instead of the garden in late July. Are there interesting things happening out there? Are there plants at peak flowering, or ripening fruit and seedpods? Or has the glory of June dissolved into a lumpen mass of greenery?

What about September? Are asters, sedum, chrysanthemums and ornamental grasses beginning their peak display, or is the garden disintegrating into a slithering mass of dying foliage?

Among the most difficult things to accomplish in gardening is designing a planting that will hold horticultural interest year-round. Most gardeners spend decades, if they're fortunate enough to stay in one place long enough, trying to find the perfect balance of style, form, texture and color that will make the garden a yearlong presence.

For most, it's a subconscious struggle: "Oh, you should have seen it a month ago," a gardener tells her friend. "It was really at its peak."

Only then does the gardener look about and realize how shabby the garden looks right then, and a mental note is made to add a few plants of monkshood to bring blue to that corner of the border in August.

Consciously thinking about the elements of a garden's design, and how they play out through the seasons, can speed up the process considerably. So, too, can keeping a garden journal, as obsessive as that may sound.

In the waning days of winter, when the nursery catalogs are arriving by the bushel, the journal can be checked for reminders about the garden gaps this year's plant order should fill.

Taking stock

Right now, before the plants break forth in earnest, is a good time to assess the garden and its needs.

If the garden in April doesn't look like a garden, it is almost certainly lacking "bones," those elements that define the essential shape of a planting, give it vertical dimension, and lend a feeling of structure and permanence. In fallow seasons, the bones, like an animal's skeleton, offer a suggestion of the garden, even though herbaceous plants are missing.

Evergreens are the most familiar role players, particularly hedges of yew or groupings of juniper, blue spruce or rhododendrons. Even herbaceous plants -- plants that die to the ground each year and regrow stems the following season -- can lend structure to a garden in the off-season, such as the freeze-dried foliage of grasses or the seedheads of Siberian iris or tall sedums.

Hardscape -- garden features wrought exclusively by people -- can also define the boundaries of a garden or suggest a human presence. A picket fence, a gravel path, a hardwood bench, a sundial or a rose arbor testify to the gardener's hand and offer hints at the plantings below ground.

Gazing at the garden in April (or, for that matter, December), can reveal where the garden is weak. Make a drawing on graph paper, and try sketching in a pyramidal yew, or a spire of 'Skyrocket' juniper, or a meandering path, or a birdbath or gazing ball. Try to think of the garden in three dimensions, seeing if there is height and depth to the planting.

It is sometimes hard to envision three-dimensional objects on a piece of graph paper. So work with reality. A stepladder can be a large yew, a shovel stuck into the soil can be a climbing vine, or a wheelbarrow can simulate a medium-size juniper. Last season's Christmas tree can be an evergreen stand-in. Crouch in the garden to consider the view from a well-placed bench.

Write down the elements that work, and plan on installing them later in the spring.

The 'off' seasons

A typical mistake by beginning gardeners is thinking only of the peak flowering periods of May and June when considering garden composition. Everyone loves daffodils, tulips, peonies, irises and roses, or flowering cherries and crabapples, and those spectacular bloomers tend to dominate garden thinking. Then, when they disappear from the landscape by late June or early July, the garden is left scruffy and bare.

Sometimes, thinking of the beginning of the gardening season can help with year-round planning.

Conifers, such as spruces and pines, and a short list of broad-leaf evergreens, such as the hollies, are the only plants that can be said to offer attractive foliage in the dead of winter. Rhododendrons still have their leaves, of course, but are usually sulking. The leaves curl and droop in cold temperatures and bring only anxiety to their caretakers, who worry whether they will ever recover -- which, of course, they eventually do.

It takes careful planning to place large-growing conifers, such as blue spruce, in the landscape. A full- grown blue spruce can be 60 feet tall and 30 feet around. But the forms and textures of evergreens and their winter greenery can be obtained in the garden by using dwarf forms.

A cultivar of blue spruce called "Fat Albert," for instance, grows slowly to 15 or 20 feet and just slightly less around, and thus can find a place in smaller gardens. The glaucous blue spruce form can also be found in miniature, such as Picea pungens("Blue Spreader"), which spreads slowly near ground level, only 2 feet or less in height. Or switch species to Juniperus squamata ("Blue Star"), which forms a roughly star-shaped mound of bright dusty blue foliage about 4 feet wide and less than 2 feet tall.

For height, Juniperus virginiana ("Skyrocket") offers a sharp punctuation point in the garden, its sharply pointed form growing slowly 20 to 30 feet, yet never more than 2 or 3 feet in diameter. And a dwarf form of white spruce, Picea glauca ("Conica"), offers a traditional evergreen form, but in a manageable 10-foot size.

One can also look to the various ornamental grasses for garden shape and form in autumn and winter. While the 5- to 6-foot clumps of grass, with their tall waving seedheads, are long dead, their forms remain to sway in the winter wind and collect sculptural coatings of snow. Typical varieties are Miscanthus sinensis("Gracillimus") or Miscanthus sinensis purpurascens. Small clumps of Festuca ovina glauca, or blue fescue, can dot the front of a winter border like an army of sea urchins.

March is the first month in Connecticut when talk of flowers is practical. And first among the flowers are the witch hazels, 15- to 20- foot shrubs that do well in the dappled shade at the edge of a woods. Their small, ribbony flowers come in coppery orange, as in Hamamelisx intermedia ("Jelena") or dark, cinnamon red, as in Hamamelis japonica, or bright yellow, as in Hamamelis mollis. Soon after the witch hazel appears, the flowering season begins in earnest with snowdrops, crocuses and forsythia. From there, the flowers take over, and the garden returns to its glory.

Autumn

Later in the season, the challenges of maintaining an active garden during the hot summer months of July and August return. Many gardeners simply don't worry about maintenance or planting during the summer heat, preferring to deal with it manana, when the cooler days of early fall approach. But the dedicated gardener wants flowers in July and August as well as May and June.

Several species offer possibilities. The yarrows have become increasingly important for late-summer bloom, as their kin now include soft pastel colors, including a clear, soft yellow, in addition to the familiar canary yellow of Achillea tomentosa.

The many campanulas, or bellflowers, provide blue and violet- blue to the late-summer landscape in shapes tall and short. And hundreds of daylily species provide dramatic flowers through the summer and into early fall. Garden phlox and bee balm are also late-summer stalwarts.

The choices narrow as autumn approaches, and the design emphasis begins leaning toward the architectural rather than purely on bloom.

The many varieties of daisy are still in their glory, and the asters are beginning to assert themselves, beginning with the stokesias. By August, dependable subjects include the butterfly bushBuddleia davidii; blue caryopteris, or bluebeards; the hydrangeas; tiger lilies; and Physostegia virginiana, or false dragonhead. The rudbeckias, or black- eyed susans, also reign in the late- summer garden.

September has relatively few bloomers, but they include the sedums, succulent plants that range from creeping groundcovers to the majestic (and omnipresent) "Autumn Joy." The asters, too, reach their peak, including the New England asters "Alma Potschke," a warm pink, and "Purple Dome," an old standard in medium purple. And the sweet autumn Clematis paniculataalso hits its stride in September with small, fragrant ivory flowers.

By mid-autumn, flowers are only a memory, and garden interest is defined in color and shape. The list of plants with vibrant autumn color is long, but among the principal players in red are the swamp maples, the serviceberries, dogwoods and Boston ivy. Purple tones can be found in white oaks and viburnums and Andorra junipers; yellow in silver maples, birches, larches, populars and beeches.

And so we come 'round again to winter, and to the plants that keep up appearances until snow and gloom lead us back to the somber dark greens of the conifers -- plants such as Corylus avellana("Contorta"), or Harry Lauder's walking stick. Its contorted, twisted branches are its best attribute and appear at their best in early winter against a wall, where its curious form, accented with pale yellow catkins, can be seen to best advantage.

Welcome, too, in the winter drabness are Cornus albaand Cornus stolonifera("Flaviramea"). Cornus alba is the red-twigged dogwood. It's an insignificant, rather plain shrub for most of the year. But when planted in large groups, its brilliant red bark glows like neon in winter, particularly when snow covers its feet. "Flaviramea" does much the same, only in yellow. Both should be pruned hard each spring to encourage new young shoots, which have the most color.

There is, indeed, life -- and color and form and texture -- after roses leave the garden. To make the most of every season, a gardener need only analyze the gaps in the garden, research the various seasonal possibilities and make a detailed plan.

Then, every day of the year, there will be a garden outside the window.